This page really has 132 insurance marketing ideas and lead generation strategies on it.

Are you ready to crush it? 💪

All of the best insurance agency marketing ideas, as well as the most creative, are here.

Use the index below to jump down to a category or specific idea. Or just scroll through the list.

Company Website

Section 1 contains marketing ideas for insurance agents using their website.

Insurance Calculators

Each month, there are 3,600 Google search queries for “life insurance calculator”.

This creates a huge opportunity to get organic traffic that you can convert into leads.

Creating insurance calculators, such as a life insurance calculator, and placing them as tools on your website will generate leads. The trick is making your calculator search optimized and easy to use.

If you optimize your calculator and the additional page content properly then it will show up in Google and bring in traffic. Once traffic lands on the page make sure the calculator asks for their email before showing the results. This is how you will capture lead info.

Quizzes

Use a plugin like Thrive Quiz Builder and put an engaging quiz on your website to promote on social media.

The quiz can help users determine if they require coverage based on a series of questions. Get creative and try to come up with a quiz that will sound enticing and be interesting and/or helpful.

At the end of the quiz, make it so the user must enter their email to get their results.

You can find plenty of quiz plugins and apps some free and some paid, and most will connect with your auto-responder to collect leads automatically.

ChatBot

You’re probably sick of hearing about InsureTech, insurance automation, insurance artificial intelligence, and insurance chatbots.

You have probably already heard of new insurance chatbots that are helping to provide insurance quotes to website visitors. This helps save the agent time while also being convenient to the consumer.

In case you aren’t aware, an insurance chatbot is a program that monitors your website 24/7. It engages website visitors by popping up a chat dialog window and offering assistance with policies claims and quoting. It can process data and connect to other systems such as a CRM, automated quoting engines, email, SMS, and more. It is beginning to replace “live chat” on insurance broker websites as it is more cost effective, available 24/7 and becoming more sophisticated and capable than a live chat agent!

We built an AI chatbot to help provide an instant quoting process on insurance websites. Our bot is consistently generating a 40% increase in website conversions for our clients.

If you are getting traffic to your website, this is a big opportunity and low hanging fruit for you to start getting more leads.

KingSumo Giveaways

This is a WordPress plugin but now also offers a web app for any type of site owner to use. You can create giveaway contests in just a few minutes that will collect emails as entries.

Not only is it easy to set up, but it also has viral social features built-in automatically like rewarding contestants for sharing the contest on social media. The contests, when strategically thought up, can create quite the buzz and bring in quite a few referrals.

It will track your entire contest and select the winners automatically for you. It automates the whole contest with email communications to all who enter. It is a premium giveaway app that can help you generate insurance leads.

Upgrade or Optimize Your Website

Building up solid traffic to your agency website is a challenge. Once you have the traffic, the challenge becomes converting it into leads and customers.

Are they able to find what they need quickly and easily? Are they greeted with consistent brand messaging and friendly professional service? Are they served a clear and relevant call-to-action?

If your website doesn’t have a professional and clean appearance with the necessary functionality and good UX then no one will have enough trust in you to ask for a quote online or give you a call.

At Leadsurance, we build insurance websites that are responsive to all device sizes.

Your site also needs premium hosting for security, speed, and performance as well as proper functionality for your agency and users.

We can help upgrade your site to meet all of your requirements.

Create Branded Content

Learn why you need branded content in your insurance marketing. Start using it to build up your brand recognition, improve your SEO, and generate more inbound leads.

You can use branded content in online paid advertising and organic campaigns on your blog and social media.

Even if you aren’t a professional copywriter or graphic designer, nowadays there are tons of tools to help you create great content.

Get a Blog Started

Speaking of branded content every agent needs a blog.

If you don’t have a website already either because of being a producer who doesn’t have control over the agency website or because you are a captive agent, you need to start a blog right away.

All it takes is a couple of minutes to get a new insurance blog set up. What is incredible about the internet is how leads will find you when you provide answers to their problems and then publish this information online.

It is best to publish neutral educational content as opposed to salesy or promotional content. Here are a few blog posts that we have created for our clients on these types of topics.

As you can see, our done-for-you content is educational, not promotional. This type of content gets the most traffic from search engines and also builds trust with prospects increasing your conversion rate on your website.

The easiest way of generating and publishing content like this that will rank in Google and bring in targeted traffic is with your own blog.

Here are some important tips to succeed:

Optimize for Life Insurance Keywords

Generating life insurance leads online is a big opportunity.

We put together a list of the best 126 life insurance keywords for marketing.

Check it out and optimize your life insurance content and campaigns for these keywords to generate more life insurance leads.

Get an Instant Quoting Tool

If your website is using contact forms to collect lead info and does not offer instant quoting, then you should consider implementing and instant quoting tool.

Quotit, Safeco, NinjaQuoter and others provide automated insurance quoting engines. In 2019, more automated insurance quotes will be delivered than in any previous year. So, now is a great time to make this investment for your agency.

We built an AI chatbot that can integrate with instant quote engines making them more accessible and user-friendly leading to a 40% increase in conversions on your website.

The chatbot eliminates the age-old long web form that users are ignoring more and more. Users prefer engagement and a bot does just that. It engages the consumer and collects the required info in a much more convenient and personal way.

There are many other automated quoting solutions on the market to look into for health, life, and property and casualty insurance. You can find them by searching specifically for solutions offering quotes for the types if insurance products you sell.

Ramp up Your Content Marketing

Whether you are doing content marketing already or not, consider stepping it up.

Content marketing is helping insurance agencies generate very high quality leads at the lowest costs.

Here is some more info on generating life insurance leads with content marketing.

Setup Squeeze/Landing Pages

A squeeze or landing page is a page the focuses on collecting information from visitors and doesn’t have any external links on it.

This is in contrast to the traffic being sent to your agency website homepage. This means you don’t have your traditional Header Navigation and Footer Menus on the page.

The idea is the user only focuses on the content you want them to see, sales copy with an offer. This increases conversions by giving the user less options.

Informational Whitepapers

A white paper demonstrates your expertise and success in a niche. You can have multiple white papers about different topics such as Life Insurance or Health.

If you’d like to collect email addresses from individuals in a particular industry or specific demographic then get a simple landing page created where your downloadable whitepaper is offered in exchange for the person’s email address. Just be sure your whitepaper topic is very interesting and valuable to your target.

Live Chat on Website

The average insurance website has around a 2% conversion rate.

This means that only 2 out of every 100 website visitors contacts the insurance agent through some channel, such as a phone call, contact form, or an insurance quote form.

The other 98 visitors out of every 100 are leaving without you ever finding out who they are. This low conversion rate is a HUGE opportunity for leads.

If you can fix this problem and increase your conversion rate then you can start building a consistent lead generation pipeline through your website.

That is the main reason you built it after all, or should have at least been one of your major marketing goals when you were contemplating the investment.

The best and most proven way to increase your website conversion rate is through live chat. We are seeing an average 40% increase in conversions with our insurance chat bot solution. We modeled it after live chat conversations.

The reason we created a bot is because manning a live chat is very difficult logistically and costly.

Consumers will use the chat at night and other odd times, so it is important to have it “manned” after hours. This makes it a challenge.

Our chat bot is available 24/7, solving this issue and keeping costs low at just $49 per month right now.

If you already have traffic, your lowest hanging fruit is to increase conversion – not invest in more traffic.

Chat is a great way to do this, whether a bot or live, just make sure you are available to customers.

VooPlayer or Wistia

If you are attempting to collect email addresses and are willing to create videos, then there are video hosting solutions which makes it very easy for collecting email addresses from online videos such as VooPlayer and Wistia.

They don’t make videos, it just makes it much easier for a video view to be branded and converted into an email subscriber.

A subscribe input can be embedded over the video or a call to action button can also be made on the video to send viewers over to your landing page so that is optimized even better to capture leads.

Host A Webinar

Putting on an online webinar and offering valuable information is an excellent way of generating leads from your webinar signups. Plus, you can automate them meaning you film and set them up one time but have them available for playback whenever your visitors are available.

It is particularly useful for creating B2B educational content. Small business insurance is a good sector for targeting with webinars for this reason.

However, it can be done for any group as long as you can put together valuable and interesting material.

Publish Content Online For Insurance Consumers

Publish content on your agent blog or agency website that is helpful for people who are shopping for insurance. Think about what kinds of questions people tend to have when shopping for insurance.

An example for life insurance could be, “do I need whole or term life?”

Then create videos, articles or other kinds of content that helps to answer those questions. Continue creating useful content for consumers who are shopping and leads will definitely find you.

Subscribe to unlock a list of the top 126 Life Insurance Keywords.

[emaillocker id=”1718″]View Life Insurance Keywords List[/emaillocker]

Conversion Rate Optimization

This involves displaying different versions of a page on your site to determine which version brings in more leads for you.

Although multivariate and A/B testing require much more traffic, as well as conversions than your typical insurance agency site, receives, it is still a good idea to take a look at your site once in a while with a critical eye towards making it easier for your leads to get a quote or contact you.

If you do not have enough traffic for A/B testing then try a service such as CrazyEgg. It will record your site visitors browser sessions on your pages so you can see exactly where they struggle to navigate on your site or decide to leave. It provides video recordings showing you exactly what your visitors are doing on your site, it is incredibly valuable data.

Search Engine Optimization

The best source of internet insurance leads in 2018 is from Google. This is where the insurance lead providers are getting them before reselling them to insurance agents.

In today’s world, savvy consumers go to Google when they are searching for insurance. If you can implement good SEO “search engine optimization” on your insurance website then the results will pay dividends.

What SEO does for your insurance website is gets it on the front page of google search results for terms like “insurance agents in austin” or whichever city you live in.

Most often these searches are performed by consumers looking for a local agent to help them purchase insurance.

We have gotten websites ranked in Google for similar search terms that began to receive high-quality leads on a consistent daily basis.

We’ve performed SEO on national sites to get them from 0 pageviews a day to over 3,500 every day producing 100’s of leads on a daily basis. For smaller local agency websites, we have implemented many SEO campaigns generating hundreds of pageviews per day and dozens of leads per month.

Finding a great SEO provider will be essential if you want to implement SEO on your website.

Achieving results on your own can be extremely difficult if you don’t have experience with SEO. The tasks involved with SEO are ever-changing, technical, and resource intensive.

So, we don’t recommend trying to take the DIY route to SEO. However, we have some other helpful articles here on our blog to help you tackle some SEO tasks on your own.

Whether you choose an SEO provider or to do it yourself, we definitely recommend you start planning to incorporate SEO into your insurance lead generation strategy, especially if you have already invested in a website.

For quality SEO work that is 100% done-for-you with a best in class reporting dashboard, hire us.

Q&A Websites

Sign up at websites such as Yahoo Answers, Ask.com, Quora, Reddit, and InsuranceLibrary where questions are asked and answered so you can start participating in discussions that relate to insurance.

You might generate leads from the people who ask the questions that you answer. However, what is even more likely is that other individuals who have the same questions later on down the road will see your answers and contact you.

Look at this strategy as a long game approach, it will actually help you generate more short term leads too. In other words, don’t ever offer anything other than pure value.

It is the best way to build trust and authority so anyone out there who is a buyer will ask for your help.

Make sure to include a link in your profile back to your main blog or website, this will help your site’s SEO and also drive some traffic to your site. A very subtle way to let people know you offer services.

Online

Section 2 contains online marketing ideas for insurance agencies.

Insurance Forums

Although many of the insurance forums consist of other insurance agents posting, you will find consumers posting questions as well.

If you can find these consumer’s questions and provide insight and help to them, then you can engage and generate leads this way. It is worth creating a free account over at: AmpInsure.org and also Insurance-Forums.com which has forums for both agents and consumers.

After contributing a few posts you will be able to create a signature. Make sure to include a link back to your main blog or site for some referral traffic and to boost your SEO.

Internet Insurance Leads

More and more people are going online to search for insurance quotes. Companies exist online that capture these consumer’s information and send them to insurance agents to follow up and provide quotes.

These internet insurance leads can be pricey anywhere from $12 – $45 per lead and often times you are required to buy a minimum batch size.

However, you are receiving contact information for consumers shopping for the insurance lines you carry. So, if you don’t have your own lead generation strategy in place, then purchasing batch internet insurance leads may be your best option.

Be careful with these leads though.

We’ve heard countless complaints from consumers searching for insurance quotes that their information was sold to 5 or more agents who then continually called them.

As it turns out, these insurance lead companies sell one lead to multiple insurance agents. This system creates a bad experience for the consumer and for the insurance agent.

No consumer wants to get multiple cold calls daily and no insurance agent wants to pay $28 for a shared lead that they must compete for with 5 other insurance agents.

Your money is better spent investing in your own marketing assets, such as your website and social media. Starting out you must buy leads or pay for advertising, but with the right lead gen strategy, you can generate your own pipeline of inbound leads. We can help with that.

Haines, Cole, YP, Hunter & FindThatLead

You can find companies that specialize in compiling accurate contact information for anybody living close to your agency. They’re called criss cross directories.

Also, nowadays there are plenty of SAAS companies allowing you to build your own directories.

There is a service or list for just about any type of insurance you may wish to sell, or you can get contact information on everyone for specific zip codes you are interested in.

The two largest companies offering these services are Haines and Cole Information.

Or use a SAAS to compile these lists of targets yourself fairly easily using various tools online. Even YellowPages.com has search options for drilling down into niches and getting contact info.

Also, try hunter.io (100 free contacts per month) and FindThatLead (100 free contacts per month).

Medium

Start a blog on medium. You can have this in addition to your traditional company blog on your website.

Your blog on Medium will reach an entirely different audience. Primarily, millenials and Gen-x, so Medium can really broaden your customer base.

You can use the free account and keep it hosted on Medium’s server, you will actually get great SEO benefit from hosting your content on their high authority domain.

Just make sure you are still blogging on your own website as well, doing both will really help your SEO. Make sure to link your articles together when the content is relevant, this is important for SEO.

Buy Insurance Leads from Providers

You probably already know that there are a plethora of insurance lead providers that you can purchase insurance leads from.

They all operate a little different in their lead generation systems and the results will vary. It is best to test multiple providers to see which one offers the highest quality leads for your niche.

Try a small batch from your top 3 providers after doing some research and then after you’ve worked all the leads review your results before buying more.

If you find that one provider generated the highest ROI, by offering leads that converted at a higher rate and/or leads that produced higher commissions, then focus your investment with this provider.

The problem with the majority of lead providers is that they are not transparent in how they collect and distribute their leads.

Many of them entice consumers into providing their contact info thinking they will get an immediate online insurance quote.

Unbeknownst to the consumer that their information is being sold to multiple insurance agents who will viciously begin cold calling this poor consumer for weeks.

This type of lead generation creates headaches for consumers and insurance agents. This is why we created Leadsurance, to fix this lead gen problem.

With our lead generation strategy, we never sell leads to multiple agents.

In fact, we don’t sell batches of leads. We build up pipelines of insurance leads for agencies.

All of our leads are exclusive and before they are connected to an agent, it is clearly communicate to the lead that they will be contacted by that specific agent.

We work as an extension of the insurance agent’s brand to the consumer so that their contact is warm. By offering exclusive and warm leads, our insurance agents and their prospects are no longer frustrated.

It creates a great experience for everyone and at the end of the day the insurance agent converts a much higher % of our leads versus our competitor’s shared leads.

See a live demo of our platform.

New Home Purchases

New homeowners are excellent targets for life insurance in addition to home insurance and other types of financial products. These transactions are public so it is easy to access the information.

Your local government site may have information available or you can find a lead service that can provide you with this kind of information.

Home Improvement Forums

If you sell home insurance, create an account on some home improvement forums. Engage and interact on some posts from time to time. Once you have posted a few times you can create a signature that will show up in all of your posts.

Purchase or Generate A List

These days it is possible to purchase lists of practically anything. Would you like to have mailing addresses for all barbers in your state? How about fax numbers for all of the chiropractors?

Whatever you are interested in, you will be able to find a list company that is happy to sell this information to you. One of the largest providers is Infogroup and I am fairly confident in the quality of their data. That will be your biggest issue here – data quality.

There are also many newer services for generating your own lists with a few clicks whenever you need them, such as FindThatLead and Hunter.io which are also worth trying.

Results will vary depending on your location and niche. Try some free trials first to see what to expect in terms of volume and quality of lead data.

Niche Forums

Ready for auto insurance marketing ideas? Heck, niche forums will give you health insurance marketing ideas too.

If you sell to specific niches, then start looking for the forums where your audience hangs out.

For example, clients who buy auto insurance can be found on niche car forums for classic, sports, exotic, or other types of car forums. Engage on these until you have posted enough to create a signature linking to your auto quote page on your website.

You can do this with just about any niche. For life insurance, figure out your customer demographic by age, gender, and interest. With your demographic outlined, you can start looking for related forums online.

Here are a couple search operators to use to find niche forums, just replace the sample “auto keywords” with your own niche keywords:

Online Yellowpages

Another method for locating all of the barbers, physical therapists, or other any kind of business located in your state is simply using the Yellowpages. It is already completely organized for you. Businesses are already broken down by category and its very easy limiting them to a certain distance from you so you aren’t attempting to contact businesses that are outside of your local market.

Press Release

First, do something newsworthy like sponsor a local sports team or event. Then write a press release announcing your sponsorship or have a PR agency write one and distribute it for you. Reach out to all the local news reports and share the press release with them. You could get picked up on local news websites and emailed out to all of their subscribers potentially getting your brand in front of thousands of prospects.

Google Adwords (PPC Ads) Campaign

You see pay-per-click ads above the regular results on Google. There is usually a colored background with these ads. For the insurance industry these ads are not cheap. However, you can pay for this kind of ad and then have traffic sent directly to a landing page for lead generation. For lead generation purposes, sending traffic directly to a squeeze page or landing page is the best thing to do.

Bing Ads and Yahoo Ads Campaigns

Although Google is where the majority of search traffic takes place, Bing still has 23% market share. This means you can still capture traffic and leads by advertising on Bing. Cost Per Click is lower on Bing, so you will also be lowering your advertising costs if you spread your budget between Google and Bing. On that note, you can important Google Adwords campaigns into Bing to get started.

Encourage Online Reviews

Whenever consumers see your agent profiles on websites like Google, Facebook, and Yelp, the quality and number of reviews you have can play a big role in determining whether they contact you or not.

If you have fewer reviews than your competitors on these sites then you will miss out on leads. Request that your clients leave positive reviews for you.

Make sure not to leave fake reviews as your listing can get banned if you are caught doing that.

Reviews are becoming more and more important for building trust and converting prospects into leads for your agency.

We recently launched our new online reviews product that automatically curates and showcases your best reviews onto your website while encouraging customers to leave feedback right from your site.

We save agents a lot of time by integrating with Facebook Reviews, Google My Business, Yelp, and YellowPages. Making sure their best reviews are always displayed and encouraging customers to leave more.

Whether you join the Leadsurance Family and use our review management software or not is up to you. But I highly recommend whatever you do, that you manage your online reviews closely as part of your marketing strategy.

Local Online Communities

There are a number of forums that cater to particular local communities. If you are a local independent agent, then these are great for getting exposure and leads.

You need to open an account in these communities and start engaging. It is not necessary to spend all your day on the forum. However, it is important that you try to help people and answer questions that will help you build up a lot of good local karma.

Do not forget to have a link to your agency website in your forum signature or profile page.

Push Notifications

Push notifications have truly become a valuable advertisement option for insurance companies with the death-grip that most people have on their phones.

People carry their phones everywhere and push notifications work best for every phone, without the need for good internet.

Of course, you will need to create an app for push notifications so this option may only be applicable for existing customers.

Thankfully, with modern platforms like Firebase, app creation and cross-compatibility are easy to manage. You can even add Firebase-powered chat notifications that are consistent across mobile and web apps to engage customers. That means however your prospects choose to engage with your brand after being exposed to your marketing materials, you can capture them consistently.

In Person

Section 3 contains in-person insurance marketing ideas.

Raffle off an Awesome Prize (try a Chromebook)

Next time you are going to be hosting an event or attending a local event, you should set up a raffle to give away a prize. You could also host the raffle through your WordPress website using a plugin like WP Giveaways. If you don’t have WordPress then try RaffleCopter as it will work with any website.

Set up the giveaway to collect people’s information on some simple raffle forms you create or through WP Giveaways or RaffleCopter and bam!

You’ve got your leads.

Sounds simple, right? Yea, it is.

But you are probably asking yourself what should I raffle off to giveaway? Honestly, anything free should get you some leads, but you can be strategic with your prize.

One great option would be a Google Chromebook. Why you ask? Well, it’s a Google product so you’ll appear modern and cool giving one away. They typically cost under $150.

Also, they aren’t as mainstream or popular as an Apple product like an iPad, so they will be very intriguing to people starting conversations and generating more raffle entries.

Restaurants

Be friendly with your wait staff and offer them a free quote leaving your business card with them. Or simply let them know that when they are ready to purchase insurance, you would love to offer them guidance.

Lunch Table Quotes

Ask people you know who work at companies with large numbers of employees if you can get a quoting table set up inside their workplace cafeterias.

Explain to them that you will not be interrupting or pressuring their employees. You will post a sign that advertises free quotes for anybody wanting to save money on their insurance and then set up a table.

Pitch the idea as if you are the one doing a favor for them instead of them helping you.

Find Agencies Closing Down and Buy Leads

If you happen to know of any agent selling or shutting down their agency, ask them if they have old leads you can purchase from them.

There is a good chance they won’t care about these leads if they are leaving the industry. So they might be open to taking a fair cash offer from you.

Another idea is to ask them what they are doing with their phone number. You may be able to make them an offer on that as well and then have it forwarded over to your phone line.

Conferences

If you ever go to sales, motivational, leadership, or niche conferences – network. Share business cards with folks and make sure to let them know how you can help them. Follow up with them after the conference with a nice email or call just to stay in touch.

Tradeshows

If you search for local trade shows in your area sometimes you can sponsor a booth. Try to find relevant tradeshows, such as a real estate technology tradeshow, and sponsor a booth. Bring everything you need to offer quotes.

Pro Tip: I recommend bringing backup batteries and your own wifi hotspot just in case there are any issues at the event.

Cash Register Contest

Speak with local business owners, particularly those located near your agency. Offer to provide an Amazon cash card or visa cash card or even a gift card to another local business.

Any prize, but cash or equivalent is always king. The prize is offered in exchange for them collecting business cards for a contest drawing and providing you with the contact information from contest entries.

You offer the prize, they offer the audience, both businesses get the leads.

Hardware Store Parking Lots

I grew up in a small town outside of Austin, called Wimberley. It is beautiful if you ever get the chance to visit. But back to my point, my dad and I would drive up to the hardware store in the morning to get supplies before going to a job. We would always see the same group of contractors doing the same thing each morning.

When I learned this next tip, it made so much sense to me, but for those without my childhood experience – pay attention.

If you are searching for the contact information for local contractors as sales leads all you need to do is drive over to your local hardware store (Lowes, Home Depot or Ace) early in the morning.

Take photos of all of the work trucks that have their phone numbers displayed on them. The best part about this idea is not only will you get phone numbers but you can mention seeing their truck at the hardware store when you call to build a little rapport starting out.

Cross Promotional Events

Hosting a special event for only your clients is frequently a very expensive and daunting endeavor. If you would like to get more leads and lighten the burden a little, have a cross-promotional event by teaming up with another local business. Every business that is involved (there could be several of them) will invite their clients and allow cross-pollination to take place.

Face Painting

If you are a hungry insurance salesperson, one who may consider themselves “savage” then this one is for you. Hire a face painter and take them to the park on a weekend when families are there. Put out a sign offering free face painting. While the kids are getting their faces painted, make friends with the parents and make sure to leave them with a card.

Find Other Local Businesses To Exchange Leads With

A majority of local business owners in your area would love getting a hold of your customer lists to use as sales leads. You won’t give that out to just anybody of course. However, if you can locate a couple of other local business people who you trust who have lists of their own as well, consider exchanging information with them.

Hire a Clown

This is another “savage” sales lead gen tip. This is for the hungry agent. Hire a clown and take them to a park or mall on a weekend when there are lots of families there. Have the clown give out balloons and take photos with kids while you network with parents.

Networking Events

Those 30 business cards that you have in your hand when a networking event ends are leads. However, like any leads, the key thing is what you do to follow-up. What I recommend that you do for a majority of your networking follow up is to use social media since it is fast and can open doors easily for helping to develop stronger and closer relationships.

Vendor/Sponsor List

Any time you have a table sponsored at a local business or community event ask the organizer if you can see a list of the other sponsors and attendees. The idea is, of course, generating leads with those you interact with. However, it doesn’t hurt to ask for a list of everybody who shows up. They may just give it to you.

Autograph Session For Local Celeb/Band/Athlete

Do you have any famous celebrities that live nearby? What about famous bands or artists? Any star athletes in your local area who can draw a big crowd? How about bringing a couple of guys in from your minor league local baseball team?

Get something together that draws in kids and their parents. In the old days, you could raffle off something so that you will be able to obtain the contact information of Mom and Dad. Nowadays you can prepare for the event ahead of time, promoting it heavily online and requiring folks to register for it with their emails.

Social Media

Section 4 contains social media marketing ideas for insurance agents.

Social Media Steps

Follow these 3 steps to social media for insurance companies. It will take some time but you will increase your organic reach. This means your page and all of its content will be seen by more people which will drive more clicks to your page and website to convert into leads.

Curate Social Media Content

Use tools like BuzzSumo and ContentStudio to filter through popular content to share on social media.

Although sharing insurance information is good you also want to share other relevant information for your clients.

For example, share some auto maintenance tips for car owners or home improvement tips for homeowners.

Once you have found interesting and relevant content to share, consider automating your social media sharing to save time.

Automate Social Media Sharing

There are dozens if not hundreds of tools to automatically schedule content to be shared on your social media profiles. Hootsuite was one of the originals.

Using a scheduling tool will save you SO much time and hassle on social media while still helping keep you top of mind with your audience.

Schedule a few weeks or months worth of posts at a time and then you can focus on other things. Don’t expect a lead on the first post. By staying relevant and top of mind when the timing is right for your prospect following you on social, they will think of you first.

Facebook Groups

You can find small business and other local Facebook groups. These are great places to mingle with local business and owners who could turn into clients. Don’t be salesy, just be present and helpful. If you write helpful blog articles, these are great places to share them in response to questions people ask.

LinkedIn Groups

You can find professional groups on LinkedIn for any profession or professional topic. This is a great way to engage niche audiences. Just getting your profile in front of the right people can be helpful so don’t be afraid to send a friendly connection request to group members with a personal note. Nothing salesy. Just hey I saw you in x group and thought we could connect.

Social Media Listening

Use a tool like Meltwater or Awario to track your brand’s mentions alongside any of your target keywords. You can get alerts when people mention your brand or keywords on social media or anywhere online. This allows you to respond to people talking about your agency and/or an insurance product or service that you can assist with.

Your Facebook News Feed

Facebook is a great place to get life insurance marketing ideas since your network openly shares all of their most important life events that create need for life insurance.

If you are trying to make a sale today, your news feed isn’t necessarily the place to go. However, if you use Facebook on a regular basis and pay close attention you will soon discover that there is an abundance of sales opportunities in your news feed. People purchasing homes, buy cars, getting married, having babies and other important life events where insurance may be needed.

Facebook Ads

When done right, Facebook ads can be both extremely effective and very affordable. You can’t just go directly into offer a quote. Facebook isn’t being used by individuals to obtain insurance quotes. People know they can always get a quote any time they want. In order to use Facebook to generate leads, offer something that people will want and be willing to exchange their information for. Your advertising costs will be lower if you collect leads on a Facebook page rather than directing visitors to your site.

LinkedIn Ads

Lately, LinkedIn has grown very quickly and there are some cool features to its ad platform. The best thing about using LinkedIn for generating lead is you are able to target individuals by their jobs. So if you happen to be searching for human resource managers who work at businesses with more than 50 employees those people can be targeted. Send traffic to a squeeze page so that the lead’s information can be captured.

Get A Quote Facebook Tab

With all that you are doing on Facebook already to improve engagement and get more fans, shouldn’t individuals have the ability to fill out a quote form directly on Facebook? Of course. If your carrier doesn’t have an app for you to use or you don’t have a developer to assist you, then there are apps that can be used for creating basic quote forms.

Facebook Contest

A contest platform such as Wildfire or Offerpop can be used for running contests for collecting leads in exchange for sweepstakes entries or some other kind of reward. The contests that are the most successful are those where participants are encouraged to share a contest with their connections on Facebook.

Monitor Twitter

The search feature on Twitter allows you to find recent tweets that were made near your physical location.

You just need to look for people who are discussing, complaining or mentioning insurance within a distance of 15 miles from your business location and get them to engage with you through an @ message.

This is called social media listening, and I’ve talked about it before. We use software to monitor our brand name as well across the web so we can respond to anyone mentioning us online – both good and bad.

We have a feed full of mentions of our brand and other keywords we track, it looks like this.

For independent agents this may be overkill, but for small agencies and anyone bigger I definitely recommend investing in a social media listenting tool and monitoring your brand and keywords.

Alumni Groups on Social Media

There must be a number of groups on Linkedin and Facebook for people who went to your school. A quick search will help you find a number of such groups. Sign up to these groups and find out what they are talking about in the group. Engaging the group for attention and connections is one benefit but also there are a number of other benefits.

One benefit is that you will have an Alumni badge on your LinkedIn profile. Also, if people in the group are already searching for an insurance professional, they might just seek you out.

Social Media Outreach

With all of the discussion and advice out there about curating and creating content for social media, a majority of agents are missing out on the absolute easiest way of generating leads on social media.

Using Facebook to interact with other local organizations and businesses in a positive way.

Facebook Friends Birthdays

It is fairly easy getting into Facebook and finding your friends’ birthdays (your personal friends not the fans from your agency’s page).

Some agents may try mailing a letter to them 6 weeks before their next birthday stating that life insurance is going to get more expensive after their next birthday.

Personally, I would just send them a Facebook message in most cases or send an email.

Pinterest

There are SO many homeowners on Pinterest if home insurance is your niche.

But auto is another great one as well as many more targeted niches such as boating and a variety of motor vehicles including dirt bikes, four wheelers, motorcycles, dune buggies, go-carts, golf carts, scooters, and more.

Health is a huge niche on Pinterest with many smaller niches within it.

We see more traffic from Pinterest to websites than many other social platforms, so be sure to share your blog content here too.

Phone

Section 5 contains phone marketing and lead generation ideas for insurance companies.

In-House Telemarketing

One big mistake that I see many agents making with their in-house telemarketing is having one individual make calls all day long. Many good producers end up burning out this way. It is much more productive and sustainable to have people make their calls for one to two hours per day during the best times of day for telemarketing.

Ask for & Calendar Expiration Dates

Asking for x-dates is one of the more underutilized tools in an insurance salesperson’s arsenal. It should just be a comfortable and natural ask during your call with a prospect.

When it comes to asking for x-dates it shouldn’t sound pushy. What you are saying to the policyholder is, “I am here to help but only when it is important to you.”

Every day, you could be collecting more x-dates building up a pipeline. Make sure you calendar these dates and follow up about a week in advance of the policy expiration. Just get on the prospect’s radar about their upcoming renewal and how you can help.

Hire an Insurance Telemarketing Company

Don’t like cold calling? Don’t have phone sales experience?

Well, there are people who cold call for a living that have sales experience. BUT they come at a cost.

However, if outsourcing is your thing when it comes to lead gen, then you can pay companies to telemarket for you and live transfer you leads.

The value in the service is that it is done for you, most insurance telemarketing companies will provide the scripts, phone numbers, sales training, and of course the cold calling.

You will just pay for the leads.

Sounds too good to be true.

And it is.

The leads are extremely expensive and the process is far from perfect. Be prepared to pay about $40 – $50 per telemarketing lead.

Also, make sure you are available to take inbound calls as they will be transferring live calls over to you. Not being available makes the program worthless and expensive!

A better solution to the old school practice of insurance telemarketing, is our chat to lead solution. Today consumers are savvy and turned off to telemarketing.

Consumers want to be in control, so they do their own research. When they have a question, they want immediate help.

With Leadsurance’s chat product our virtual assistant is availble 24/7 to assist insurance consumers shopping with instant quoting and more. We have a proven insurance sales conversion process via chat and we convert these consumers to leads and send them to our partner insurance agents and brokers.

After an introduction, we send our conversation and lead info directly to the agent in real time to follow up with the consumer immediately.

We’ve found that this creates the best experience for modern consumers and insurance agents. Giving both parties adequate control over communications while maintaining a speedy transfer process.

Oh yea, and our pricing doesn’t break the bank, we start at just $49 per month.

Hire a Dedicated Phone Salesperson

If having someone dial out all day for your agency is something you want, you should hire someone specifically for this task. When they have the appropriate expectations from the start, you are much more likely to be successful. The way to compensate this person is with a minimal base or hourly pay alongside a large commission for meeting quotas.

Emergency Verification Calls

Get leads from commercial clients by asking your property insurance customers to give you an emergency contact such as a nearby business or neighbors. When you make a call to the emergency contact, you shouldn’t sell anything but you just need to verify their information and tell them that you will send a magnet that will have your phone number. Tell them to keep it handy so they can give you a call in case they are unable to get a hold of the owner of the property in case of any issue with the property.

Get Into Your Clients’ Cell Phone

If people don’t have your information on them there is less of a chance of them referring leads to you. And the more clients you have with your agency number stored in their cell phones the greater your chances are of having new leads referred to you. It isn’t a hard thing to encourage people to have your number in their cell phones since most clients will agree it’s a good thing to have the number of their agency on hand, but it won’t happen unless you push it.

Phone Camera

This tip won’t generate leads but it will help you track them.

It may seem obvious but sometimes you need reminding, use your smart phone!

It actually is pretty smart, and a great way of tracking your new leads is to use the camera on your cell phone or take screenshots of info.

Any time you are out and about and spot a business that would be good for you to contact, take a picture of the work vehicle or storefront that has their contact information on it.

Alternatively, when you are reading about a business on your phone through a website or app like Facebook, take a screenshot of their contact info.

Or, copy their contact info and create a new contact right then and there. You can contact them later when you are prepared.

Auto Accident Claimants

These are the individuals that your customers hit with their vehicles. It is important obviously that you take good care of your customers throughout the entire claims process. However, you should also consider the sales opportunity that could potentially exist with the other part that is involved. What you could do is reach out the same way that you would to your customers. Or perhaps you could send direct mail to them once the claim has been resolved peacefully.

Local Networking

Section 6 contains local networking ideas for insurance agents.

Real Estate Agents

For insurance agents, realtors can be a major lead generation source. Keep in mind that real estate agents are similar to you. More leads is all they need to be more successful. Supply them with leads and they return some back to you. The numbers show that one insurance agency in this kind of situation can support several different insurance agents.

Partner With Accountants

I was an accountant in my previous career. We worked closely with lawyers and insurance brokers. We referred business in every direction it seemed but most commonly we referred clients to our insurance broker friends.

This strategy holds true for any type of financial advisor, so also apply this to your CFP friends (certified financial planners) or anyone you know managing investments.

I know of a few agents who have been able to grow books of business of a considerable size almost exclusively from referrals coming from a close friend who was an accountant, so it is definitely something that works.

Motorcycle Dealers

You sell motorcycle insurance, they sell motorcycles. I suppose it should be a fairly good fit, right?

Keep in mind that motorcycle dealers aren’t looking to help their clients get affordable coverage for a good price or have you pay a commission to them.

They are trying to sell their motorcycles. So they will like you if you make it easier for them to sell more motorcycles.

Referral Breakfast Group

Just about every place has referral breakfast groups. Here is how the process works in case you haven’t ever been to one. A group of entrepreneurs (just one per industry) gather once a week in order to give each other referrals, network and discuss business. What is great about being a group’s insurance agent is just about everyone needs insurance, unlike a dog groomer, so it is fairly easy for the other members in the group to refer you.

Table at Community Events

Whenever there is an opportunity for you to appear at a local community event and show your face either you or somebody else from your agency needs to be there. Purchase a nice cloth banner that can be draped over a table that has your logo on it. Also make sure you give away plenty of free swag and have things to give away or raffle in exchange for obtaining leads.

Bring-a-Friend Event

You can host an event such as a party of free movie that individuals will want to go to. Make the event for anyone bringing a friend along. Collect the contact information of the friend, including who brought them to your event. This will bring you new referred leads.

Apartment Complexes

Although renter’s insurance might not bring in the big money, it is still an easy way of getting your foot in the door. Also, many people renting now will end up buying a house in the future. If you write renter’s insurance quite often you can get your client a multi-policy discount on their auto insurance, which could give you that extra push you need for closing the deal. So how do you start making connections? Begin by asking yourself what you can do to help make thing easier for the apartment manager.

Other Insurance Agents

Yes, other insurance agents actually can be an excellent source of leads. The key is finding agents who don’t want to or can’t write the same type of business that you do. There are numerous reasons why another agent may send a lead to you. For instance, captive agents must turn away many customer who don’t meet the qualifications of their carrier.

Boat Dealerships

As opposed to cars, boat dealerships will have a fair number of first-time buyers who may be in search of their first insurance policy for a boat. So with the right connection you could end up writing a large number of new policies. Boat owners are an excellent market to sell to. Therefore, it can definitely be worth it to you to think about the types of joint opportunities that you might be able to work on with boat dealers for mutual benefit.

Referral Lunches

Ask a business colleague out to lunch with the mutual understanding that you will both bring a lead for the other individual. Just having one lunch like this won’t make your whole sales career. However, if you start getting into the habit of doing this once a week or a couple of times per month it can start to add up. Always be sure to bring a good potential prospect for your friend.

Purchase The Old Leads Of Other Agents

I realize that many agents are successful with following up on old leads 6, 12 or even 24 months after their initial contact. However, many agents don’t make the effort. A majority of agents allow their old leads to just gather dust. It isn’t difficult to find somebody who is willing to give a large stack of them to you for under a dollar each. The best agents to ask are those old-timers who realize they won’t ever use the leads and are attempting to squeeze every last cent out of their businesses before they are totally worthless. We all know a few of those agents.

RV Dealerships

If people still have money to enjoy trips on a recreational vehicle considering the price of gas nowadays, it means they do have some disposable income. One unique thing about RV insurance is that most RV owners don’t think that they know enough about insurance and therefore, they are willing to listen to others about insurance. This is the right time for you to demonstrate your insurance expertise.

Mortgage Brokers

They are similar to insurance brokers in terms of being limited by how many leads they are able to get a hold of, so working with mortgage brokers is a sensible thing for insurance agents to do. It can make mortgage brokers happy by providing them with the main two things they want to get from insurance agents: deals where there aren’t any hang ups with the insurance and more leads.

Be A Guest Speaker Many local community groups love having guest speakers for their meetings. A majority of agents may think of business groups first. However there are many other groups that will allow you to share valuable information with their audiences. Try obtaining a contact list for all attendees and follow-up shortly afterward with them.

Car Dealerships

People purchasing their first car will of course need to buy insurance. First-time car buyers are unfortunately not usually the best clients and aren’t the majority of new car buyers. However, the basic act of purchasing a car is a great sales opportunity for anybody since the price of their insurance will probably change and that is motivation enough to get somebody thinking about making the larger change of switching to a different carrier. Become friends with plenty of car dealers to see if any of them are willing to hook you up with their current carrier as well as contact information on all their customers who purchase new vehicles.

Agency Next Door Neighbors

You may not want to use my earlier suggestion of door-to-door lead generation. However, all agents should definitely go door-to-door and meet other business owners that are close to your agency. Those connections are not only great leads, they are even better as referral sources. Ask how you can refer business to them and follow through instead of asking them to refer your agency. They will return the favor.

Involve Your Friends

Teach your friends to generate leads for you. Make certain they understand and know about everything you sell. Also teach them about the kind of clients you are searching for, and help them with identifying situations where they would be perfect for referring them to your agency such as when a coworker is complaining about their monthly bills.

Moving Companies

If you know somebody who is in the moving business see if you can get them to inform you about their new clients. Purchasing a new house, getting divorced, getting married, moving out of state or any of the many other reasons why people end up moving all have one thing in common: they are opportune times for talking to an insurance agent. Also, many people will inform their insurance agent that they will be moving ahead of time so you could potentially be a good referral source for movers.

Entrepreneur Groups

Get a group of aspiring entrepreneurs together and you will end up with a room that if full of great insurance leads. However don’t just join these groups to speak about entrepreneur’s insurance needs to try to sell policies. Instead be a valuable resource of knowledge about customer service, networking, marketing and all other things you have had to perfect as part of running your insurance business.

Door To Door

No one want to use this one. However, I do promise it works. Door-to-door lead generation does work for both commercial and residential and it isn’t necessary for you to do it yourself. You can always hire a college or high school kid to collect leads or hand out brochures. For local agencies it is very important to capitalize on any face-to-face opportunities that are available to you. An 800 number or website isn’t able to knock on doors.

Email

Section 7 contains email marketing ideas for insurance agencies.

Cold Email

Using a couple of inexpensive services you can create highly targeted email outreach campaigns to prospects you have never met. The trick is personalizing your message and not being salesy. This is easier said than done. The tools you will need will be a prospecting too for finding email address, you can try hunter.io or Find That Lead. Then you need something like MailShake or LemList to help you create and manage your messages. These tools allow you to insert variables to personalize your message with things like recipient’s first name, company name, or and data you collect on the lead. You must do this in order to personalize the messages and get better results.

Sending Your Clients Marketing Emails

Send out an email to your current customer list that describes the best kinds of services and products you have for certain types of clients. The key here is using a call to action where the individual receiving the email is asked to forward it to friends they would like to refer. This makes it very easy for your client to refer others to you and the prospect will be provided with all of your information that includes a description of themselves as the kind of individual you provide assistance to.

Lead Nurturing Process

Different leads obviously require you to use different approaches with them. You should sell right away to an active shopper. However, for leads who are not shopping actively at this time, you need to have a process developed that helps to nurture the relationship. For instance, if a lead’s x-date is in 6 months, send a few helpful emails during this time, along with a letter at the start of the month that explains you will be calling for a quote on a specific day. If you have contacted them 3 to 5 times and haven’t pushed for the sale, this cold lead will be fairly warm by the time you try to sell to them.

Stay Top of Mind

You should periodically emails your past clients just to stay top of mind. This type of content must be non-intrusive, such as a happy birthday email or a holiday email. This simply gets your audience’s attention and puts your brand on top of their mind so that they will be thinking of you when the time comes to make an insurance purchase.

Other

Section 8 contains all other insurance marketing ideas.

Review Your Book Of Business (Database)

What we mean by auditing your book is just getting your book of business filtered down based on specific factors so that your ideal customers can be identified for targeting certain products.

For a majority of established agencies, more insurance can be sold to your existing base of customers than anyplace else.

Some of the most common things you want to look for include: single-line policies, have children at home, policy anniversary, job change, new vehicles and milestone birthdays.

Engagement/Marriage Announcements

Many people who are getting engaged or married place an announcement in their local newspapers. Those couples are ideal targets for insurance agents since they are frequently searching for new policies such as home or life but also entering into a new stage of their lives and tend to be more receptive to having conversations about how a trusted insurance agent can help them.

Sponsor a Local Team or Event

Sponsoring a local team or event won’t directly and immediately produce leads. However, this can get your brand on signs and around town. It builds trust and paints your image in a great light too. Additionally, it can be used to gain some media attention in local news outlets.

Mailback Newspaper Inserts

Some agents swear by this particular lead generation tactic. A mailback card is a small paid postcard that can used to enter your contact information on and then dropped into the mailbox. No stamp is needed since you are billed by the post office for the postage. The agents that I know who like the concept are all captive agents obtain cards for fee. If you needed to pay to have them printed it might not have such a worthwhile payback.

Alumni Database

If your high school or college has an alumni database it can be an excellent place to search for potential customers to reach out to. The school I went to even allows you to search by location, job title or industry which for the right individual can be an absolute goldmine for leads.

Scan Business Cards

Download an app like ABBYY or CamCard so you can start scanning in business cards you receive from people. This will automatically create contacts using the card’s data so you don’t have to manually enter the data.

Use The Three Foot Rule

Many sales people subscribe to this idea that when anybody is within 3 feet of them,  they should do their best to give their business card to them. Try it out, just make sure you are pleasant and not overbearing.

When I do this, I don’t think about offering my business card. Instead, I focus on striking up a relevant conversation in the moment and if we are able to build rapport then I casually hand over my card at the end of the conversation. I just say it was nice meeting you, please feel free to contact me.

This way, the whole experience is about the relationship, not the business.

Chamber of Commerce

These are excellent kinds of network events and a good way to meet new members of your community. However, they are an excellent source for leads as well. Many Chambers provide their members with a contact list that can be used for finding other members. However, if that isn’t available to you, then check to see if there is an online directory on their website. Even when you aren’t a member, at a majority of Chamber websites you will still to be able to use their online directory for finding businesses in your local area.

Promotional Items

Find a promotional products distributor and order a batch of products. You can get branded hats, mouse pads, ink pens and more. At your next marketing event lay out the items around your booth. Keep a sign posted that says you get to choose a free item when you get an insurance quote.

Referred By Cards

Have some basic “referred by” cards made up to give out to clients. You can write their name on the cards and then ask if they will hand them out to people who they know that you could help. The key with this tactic is educating your customer on who your ideal customer is. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, you will get better results the more specific you can be about who your ideal referral is.

Lost Customers

This isn’t quite generating leads. However, think about how hard you are working your former customer list? At times it might be difficult to market to individuals you have lost already. However, as long as things ended on good terms, there is always a chance that they will return. Many people discover that the grass isn’t always as green on the other side as they thought is was. Your old customers could turn out to be among your most valuable leads.

Client Referral Kit

Have a referral kit created to give to your clients that is full of information and tools to make it easy for them to provide your agencies with referrals. In the kit you should include things such as “referred by” cards, sell sheets with everything you sell, T-shirts, magnets, bumper stickers and anything else you may think of that will make things easier for clients to send you more leads.

Host Seminars

For the financial services sector these can be especially useful. Seminars can be an excellent method for generating leads. Ask everybody that you invite to bring a friend with them and be sure to put on a very good show. Teach your seminar attendees how to identify promising referral opportunities for you in addition to selling to them. That way you can obtain even more leads from the friends of your attendees. Be sure to have some type of food at your event, to make sure people actually show up for your seminar!

Bumper Stickers

Get bumper stickers promoting your brand made. Make sure to include clear contact information. Put them on your car, and everyone in your family. Have you employees use them too.

Job Change Notifications

Pay attention in LinkedIn to the messages that appear in your newsfeed any time a connection of yours changes jobs. That is because there are several different reasons why someone changing jobs can be a good sales lead if you are an insurance agent. Just don’t forget to congratulate them before going straight for rolling their 401(k) over.

Alumni Groups

Are there any local alumni groups at your college where individuals network and get together? That can be a great place for you to meet new leads given that it provides such a powerful shared experience. You could always be a founding member if there isn’t one already.

Vehicle Wrap

You can take your car to a company that will wrap it in an advertisement. It may sound tacky and to some it is. But, I have seen multiple insurance agencies use this method with success. It can certainly help brand you in a local community.

Quotes through Donations

You may tie up with a local charity to get insurance quotes where you can donate them a certain amount of money for each quote during a particular period of time. Make sure that you do not give them money for leads that would have already come your way.

You need to find a local charity that will actively work to send its supporters to your insurance agency. Check the numbers of Facebook fans they have and you should also ask them to use social media to get you more insurance quotes. Also, ask them to share the member list with phone numbers.

Voice Recording

You should keep your voice recorder with you at all times if you want to get leads even when you are on the road. This will allow you to record the phone numbers as well as business times of various storefronts and commercial vehicles that you want to reach out to. It is important that you get as much information on the recorder as you can to ensure that you have a lot of material to talk about when you make the call.

Free Consulting for Small Businesses

Engage people in your community by offering free consulting to small businesses in case you already have been an entrepreneur for some time. While it may seem like a waste of time to you, the fact is that you will get the most leads and referrals from your protege. It is also likely that your protege will make friends with other business owners who will need insurance in the future.

Project 100 List

It’s known by many different names but the basic idea is to write down the names of at least 100 people you know and could call. Give instructions to your staff to prepare this list. It is important that you do this activity with his new staff members to help them learn and build comfort with the audience.

Out-Of-State Agents

It is important to network with out-of-state agents, especially agents from the neighboring states. This will help you get leads from the clients moving to your state. Everyone wants a good insurance agent who will take proper care of them and this allows you to be that person.

You should try to connect on LinkedIn with every out-of-state insurance agent that you personally meet. Higher the number of agents you connect with across the US, the better.

Just Ask

Sometimes, you can get a lot of leads by simply asking people if they are happy with their current insurance.

Actually, you can really start to learn people’s paint points with this question and learn how to improve your agency. Almost always you will hear something negative, which is great feedback.

Just talk and explain to them you work as an insurance agent and specifically what your value prop is.

Always keep a repertoire of a few simple questions and you will be able to generate a huge number of leads in any given month by talking about insurance in everyday situations.

If you are smooth and approachable and not salesy then you will be able to consistently generate warm leads and strike up a nice rapport.

Trade Shows

If you are good at talking to industry professionals, you should go to trade shows as you can generate a good number of leads if you have the right insurance product for that particular trade.

For example, there are tons of real estate tradeshows where you could sell commercial insurance, make referral partners for homeowners insurance etc.

While it’s true that your table may be the least interesting in the trade show that just means it is up to you to get people’s attention and interest.

A game or giveaway helps with this, a mascot for pictures, food, drinks, promo items, get creative. Signs work too.

Lost Sales

It’s a fact that nobody is able to close all the leads all the time. You must be sitting on a number of old leads that you were not able to close the first time around.

Give them a call at least once a year unless you have been able to find out that they are not going to qualify for any of the insurance products you sell.

Also, do not forget to keep good notes on these leads that you haven’t been able to close. You will be glad in 12 months from now that you did.

Our free CRM for insurance agents tracks your ‘lost’ leads so that you can pull a report of them and get them back in your pipeline.

Your Family

It should go without saying that family members of yours will probably purchase their insurance from you. However, in terms of lead generation, you can get much more out of them than merely a few policies.

Be sure that your family members are well educated regarding all of the various kinds of insurance you sell as well as the kinds of clients you are searching for. The better you are able to educate your family members on how to refer to your agency, the greater the amount of leads you will receive.

Just asking them for referrals won’t work. They need to have a little understanding of your value proposition and your target customer. That way they can identify good leads and warm them up for you.

Annual Policy Reviews

Don’t forget about all of the up-selling and x-selling lead you have that are directly inside your current book of business. You can offer to do an annual review for all of your customers and part of your conversation can be about discussing your referral program with them.

Remember that free CRM for insurance agents we offered you? It will track all of your expiration dates and up-sell opportunities for you.

Create a Referral Program

You have clients who can refer business to you. By taking the time to communicate to them that you would appreciate their referrals and are willing to offer something for them, you are more likely to receive more referrals.

Be clear in your communication both on your materials promoting the program and in your direct communications with clients.

Improve Your Signage

Don’t forget about those really obvious things. Is the sign for your agency clearly visible for street traffic? Is it easy to read the phone number?

Can people driving by your agency on a daily basis tell you are inside selling insurance? Are you able to put out signs next to to the road during the day and then bring them in for the night?

Get Your Lead Generation Goals Established

One of the most common sales mistakes is setting goals based on sales rather than on actions that lead up to sales.

Set very specific goals to generate leads such as generating a new lead every day from someone you don’t know or capturing an x-date every day from an existing customer. Make sure that your goals are attainable and specific.

Be Very Nice To All Carrier Employees

In the past I worked for a major national carrier. You might be surprised at the amount of business getting referred from inside of the company to preferred agents.

This comes from various situation, however sales managers, marketing reps, underwriters and other kinds of carrier employees are continuously referring business out to local agents.

This pretty much happens on the basis of who they happen to like best. So be sure these people like you. It’s definitely worth biting your tongue when necessary.

Review The Policy Endorsements Of Your Clients

Another situation where leads could be lying right underneath your nose is policy endorsements that you are processing already.

Do you have anyone in your agency who reviews all of the policy changes of your existing customers to look for potential sales opportunities?

If you are resourceful and clever enough I would argue that you could consider just about any policy change to be a sales lead.

Lead Generation Contest

Have your agency hold a contest to see who is able to bring the most leads into the sales funnel for your office.

You can establish rules so that leads have to come from a specific source (for example, provide a list for cold calling) or from anywhere to help force your producers into new lead generation territory and out of their comfort zones.

Appreciate Referrals That Don’t Buy

Many agents offer special attention and rewards to clients when the leads they refer result in sales.

That is a good thing obviously.

However, it is equally as important rewarding for, or at least communicating about, referrals that don’t end up in a sale.

A referral source is so valuable, even if one particular referral doesn’t workout you need to stay in communication and positive standing with all of your referral sources at all times.

Leaving them out of communication or not providing some sort of thank you after not selling to one of their referrals is bad communication.

Hire an Artist

Have a painter, sketch artist, or caricature artist the next time you have a marketing event with a table or booth.

Offer free paintings, sketches and caricatures to people who get insurance quotes or give their information the following week for a quote.

Look for an artist at local art colleges or on Craigslist that are reasonably priced or even willing to do free portfolio work.

Direct Mail

Send out a direct mail campaign to your local clients on their birthdays. It will really help your connection to your clients and help you to generate more referrals.

Holiday cards are also welcomed, just be tasteful and don’t offend anyone’s religious beliefs. People can be “PC” these days, so just a “Happy Holidays” is safer than “Merry Christmas”.

Holy Cow

You made it through all 132 insurance marketing ideas!!

Congratulations!

Now, drop any excuses and get out there!

Go on, beef up your insurance marketing and start generating some insurance leads today.

Use our insurance marketing ideas checklist and get started right now by telling me in the comments below which strategy you plan to try first.